by Rob Welham
BEIJING, Jan. 25 (Xinhuanet) -- Mozilla has officially launched Firefox 3.6. The update has been long overdue, but its arrival boasts several improvements. It introduces a modest assortment of new features and expands the browser's support for emerging Web standards such as HTML5. It's been roughly six months since the release of Firefox 3.5, Mozilla's last major update.
One of the most visible new features in this latest release is the Personas system, which brings support for lightweight theming to Firefox. It allows users to apply a custom visual style to the browser's user interface elements, including the toolbars, menus, tabs, and status bar. It's intended to provide a simple alternative to Firefox's existing theming engine. Unlike conventional Firefox themes, which can profoundly alter the look, feel, and behavior of the program at a multitude of different levels, a Persona is like a decal that you can apply to the top layer.
The speed of the updated browser has also been improved according to several reports. Mozilla's new Firefox 3.6 is about 15 percent faster than its predecessor, Firefox 3.5, but is still slower than Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome. According to tests run by Computerworld, Firefox 3.6, which Mozilla launched on Thursday, is the third fastest of five Windows browsers tested. Firefox renders JavaScript three times faster than Opera 10 and more than four times faster than Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). It is also 14.5 percent faster than Firefox 3.5, the Mozilla browser that debuted in June 2009, a slightly larger speed increase than Mozilla has claimed. But even with the JavaScript speed boost, Firefox 3.6 is unable to match speeds of Safari or Chrome. Safari is twice as fast, and Chrome 4.0 nearly twice as fast, as Firefox.
On another oft-quoted scoring system, the final of Firefox 3.6 did not budge from earlier beta builds of the browser. As it had last year during its beta testing, the production version of Firefox 3.6 scored 92 out of a possible 100 on the Acid3 benchmark, which is used to measure how closely a browser follows standards related to DOM (Document Object Model), CSS2 (Cascading Style Sheets) and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). Current editions of Safari, Chrome and Opera all score 100 on the Acid3 test, while IE8 reaches only 24.
With recent concerns over security, it is the vulnerability to hacking and other exploits which are at the top of people's agenda. Mozilla says that security is a top priority and the new updated browser is more secure than ever. To keep users safe from potential security vulnerabilities, Firefox will now detect out of date plugins. Mozilla says that users don't always understand the role that plug-ins play in the Web experience and might not even realize that they have plug-ins installed. This is a major impediment to giving users the ability to protect their own security. The PluginCheck system is a new feature that Mozilla has introduced to address some of the problems caused by faulty browser plug-ins. It gives the browser the ability to make the user aware when a vulnerable plug-in is detected.
Firefox currently accounts for about 25 percent of all browsers used worldwide, according to the most recent data from Web metrics company NetApplications.com. With a quarter of the browser market, Firefox is a distant second to IE's 63 percent, but is still way above the current number 3 browser, Chrome, which has a 5 percent share.
(Agencies)
